January 28, 2018

Spending Time

I have been settling into a new life without a team or an employer for the past eight months. With this I’ve had to make a slew of decisions to align my activities to my priorities. This has been greatly beneficial for my mental health and overall happiness.

For the first month as I was working on this redesign, I tracked the time I spent digitally with RescueTime. I noticed I was spending time on social media past the point of positive return and I felt overwhelmed on weekdays.

I test a new work schedule: 5 hours a day, 6 days a week instead of 7 hours over 5. My gym sessions were moved to match the days as a prompt to start work immediately after. Further clarifying my priorities led me to dropping some projects I was working on like The Pastry Box Project and a book I had started.

Overall my goal has been to quantify the number of hours I spend on an activity and match it to my list of priorities in descending order:

Priorities

Main Project - 25 hours

Friends/Family - 12-20 hours

Fitness/Health - 10 hours

Students - 8 hours

This website/blog - 2 hours

Doing this made huge impacts on how I worked and I’ve now since started applying this to micro-decisions about my new project.

Since I’m in the early stages of determining product market fit, I’m dropping the 10% in polish in exchange for the 90% I know will get me the results I’m looking for saving the polish for empty moments in between testing.

I’m currently hovering around 30 hours of work a week but I’m getting more done with less time. It likely won’t continue like this once my project gains more momentum but for now I’m enjoying that I have enough time to stop and smell the flowers.